1000 Miles

 Look what we accomplished this morning!

"Ready for 1000 more!" exclaims the happy, happy fun kids.

Yes, that's right, the 6 year olds, Jack & Rudy, have now surpassed 1000 miles of skijoring for 5 straight seasons. The tally is 2019/2020: 1204.1 miles; 2020/2021: 1253.2 miles; 2021/2022: 1315.4 miles; 2022/2023: 1444.0 miles; 2023/2024: 1004.7 and counting with the rest of March then April, May (and maybe some June?) to continue adding to this season's tally. Impressive kids!

We decided to use the French Gulch Trail for this morning's feat. This trail is always the first to melt in Spring, so if you can use it in March (or April) then you do! Well, we've had a snowy week without too much warming, so it was off to French Gulch this morning to surpass 1000 miles for the season. This trail also gets driven by the handful of homeowners sprinkled throughout the gulch who have keys to open the winter gate preventing all other traffic from driving here. As a result, the trail evolves into two set tracks on each side of the trail corresponding to tire tracks from the occasional vehicle. It makes for a unique skijor as Jack & Rudy like to take one track each while I glide down the untouched middle powder. Fun!

Jack & Rudy a "vehicle width apart" as I glide in the middle powder.

French Gulch is known for one very interesting feature: it is home to a very active moose population. We do not always see moose on outings here but Jack & Rudy catch the scent of moose in their noses EVERY outing in French Gulch. Usually, they'll catch the scent of moose multiple times along the way.

One of the scent of moose events today was extra entertaining from Jack & Rudy. As we were trotting along, Jack clearly caught the scent of moose to our right and decided to scale the super high snow wall to look for moose:

"Sniff, sniff, moose nearby, I'm going to jump, climb and investigate!" says
moose seeking Jack.
"Hey bro, that's a high wall!" adds curious Rudy.

Rudy is certainly not going to be outdone. If Jack smelled a moose, then you know Rudy did too. So here is Rudy following suit while Jack is up high enough to peek over the high snow wall:

"Made it! Where's the moose?" asks Jack.
"Here I come!!!" adds wall scaling Rudy.

Now this all happened very fast. The elapsed time from the Jack initial climb photo to the following photo was about 3 seconds. I was quickly trying to get the situation under control and was hoping a moose would not appear suddenly from the other side of this snow wall!

"Made it! Where's the moose? We smell it!" asks the successful wall
scaling moose seekers.

I tried to peer over the wall myself but it was too high. I also wanted to coax Jack & Rudy down before a moose did appear! I did get them down and we went forward a little bit to the two trees just ahead of Jack & Rudy. The wall was a little lower between these trees. We all stopped again and gazed into the trees but failed to spot an actual moose. But, with this intense a reaction from Jack & Rudy means there definitely was a stinky moose nearby, we just couldn't see it in the dense trees.

Well, that was an exhilarating moment. Now, back to skijoring. We went all the way out French Gulch and even redid two nice sections of trail twice. But, we were still way ahead of schedule to arrive back at the trailhead. Not a problem, the Sallie Barber Mine Trail shares the same trailhead parking lot with French Gulch. So we added a little extra distance to our outing going partway up to the mine and them coming back down. The difference between the French Gulch Trail and Sallie Barber Mine Trail could not be more extreme. From vehicle sized set tracks on French Gulch to very narrow single tracks on Sallie Barber:

The kids now zipping along in narrow backcountry trails of Sallie Barber.

Today's video highlight will go along with the prior photo. Come along and watch Jack & Rudy speeding along in the narrow backcountry. Keep in mind this is near the end of our outing. The kids NEVER show any sign of slowing down, it's only me who gets tired :)

[watch on youtube if no video loads below]

Another season, another 1000 miles of skijoring and counting. Will we get to 1100 miles, certainly. Will we get to 1200 miles, probably. Will we get to 1300 miles, probably not but you never know. How about 1400 (like last year's record season), probably not but stay tuned!

What a way to earn end of run treats:

"We could go on forever; but treats are great too!" says the happy kids.

Today's tally: 8.6 miles traveled with 800 feet of elevation climbed and a top speed of 22 MPH.

2023 Season to Date: 117 days on the trails covering 1004.7 miles with 98,400 feet of elevation climbed.